Posted
by
Zonk
on Saturday October 14, 2006 @09:33AM
from the i-would-like-a-pony dept.

Krishna Dagli writes to mention an article over at Ars Technica discussing the Firefox team's call for feature suggestions. Version 3 of the software is already in the works, and the team members are looking to the community for ideas on where to go next. From the article: "The wish list is long indeed, and it provides an insight into the desires of the browser community, and a look at the open source development process. While closed-source projects often ask their user community for feedback on requested features, the process is not usually open to the public. For Firefox 3, anyone can both suggest new features and comment on other people's suggestions. The feature requests are divided into categories, such as browser customization, privacy features, security, history, download manager, and other areas. There are suggestions for features found in other competing browsers, such Safari, IE 7 beta, and Opera. IE7 seemed to be featured most prominently, with requests for "low-rights mode," as well as more cosmetic features like skins that mimic Microsoft's browser."

Moderators who are too used to Digg and mod down anything they personally don't like, even if it's factually correct and/or relevant and/or insightful humour, having the gall to cancel out the mod points of someone who, despite only getting given points every few months, still thought the comment was funny enough to mod up.

May I direct your attention to the setting which allows you to apply a penalty of -lots'o'points to anything marked as "funny" so that you personally never see anything entertaining again.

It's a reference to the trouble Debian are having with Mozilla (shall we call it the IceWeasel debacle [wikipedia.org]?) - Debian only includes Free[tm] packages and files in their distribution, the Firefox logo isn't Free. So Debian created their own logo for firefox, and use that instead. But Mozilla don't like that, and asked them to either use the firefox logo or stop calling it firefox

The slashdot extension ought to have an OMG Ponies theme built into it. Taco's wife would be proud.

In FF3 I'd like to see integrated.torrent downloading, or at the very least a default Add On button in the corner of the window, so there's no menu a noob has to click into to install features that may become standard in other browsers. That way they are only 3 clicks away from installing a new feature, instead of missing out because it's part of a long menu with no highlighting graphic even.

"How about having system prompts popping up in tha status bar instead of popup. And put the contents of the Bookmarks on the menu at the top."

In keeping with my request to allow for intuitive suppression of the nasty ""do you want to remember password for this site?" popups, they should put an option on the system prompts that you can click to make them go to the status bar from then on: "Do you want future such popups on the status bar instead?"

I love how Firefox nicely diminishes popups that come from intentional design of web programmers, but the way Firefox itself throws annoying hard-to-get rid of popups needs some work.

This is exactly what I wish firefox was and what I thought was the project's prime goal. It would be great if Firefox was as modular as it could be instead of seeing that feature getting eroded with time. For example, it would be great if the search bar was converted into a pure extension.

Make it fast, compliant and secure. Leave everything else to extensions.

I take it you haven't read the CSS specs. There's no way that you're going to make it "fast" and "compliant" at the same time. You'll have to chose one of them. The reason some browsers feel fast today is because we have fast computers or they skip corners when it comes to the standards.

Oh, one good step would to make an "force xml mode", in which xhtml is allowed, but non xml-compilent markup is rejected. I'm only guessing, but if the

And, as an addendum to that, make extensions run in some sort of "protected memory" area so they can't take the browser down with them. If that's not possible at least make instances of the browser run seperately so a crash doesn't take down the whole lot.

Are you proposing loading up a new instance of Firefox for every open window? I regularly use both windows AND tabs, and it's not uncommon for me to have 4-5 windows open (1 window = 1 research subject, and windows have many tabs in them all relating to the same subject). Your proposal would quadruple the memory requirements on Firefox for my system.

If such a feature is included, I would like to be able to turn it off. My firefox very, very rarely crashes (once every few *months* Java or Flash bring it down). If you're having crashing problems, you should start up a new profile and re-install your extensions one by one to see which one is causing you the grief.

Plugins
Run plugins as a independent process, that talks with firefox via a socket or something like this. If a plugin crash it doesn't take firefox with it. It also allow one to kill a locked or high load plugins and keep surfing.
Run plugins as a independent process, so that when they leak memory, that memory will be freed when the tab or window is closed.
Run plugins as a independent process, so that when a plugin refuses to shut down (like acroread), the browser can forcibly kill it.

Stability and resource-utilization improvementsPut each document into an independent process (not thread: separate forked process) so that:
When a document causes Firefox to crash, the whole browser won't be taken with it.
When a bug in Firefox stomps on memory it doesn't own, other documents in memory are not corrupted.
When a document causes Firefox to leak massive amounts of memory, closing that tab or window will free up the wasted memory.
When a bug in Firefox or a script on the page locks up (infinite loop or whatnot), the whole browser will not hang up, just the one document. Closing the tab or window kills the aberrant process. This is also an issue for DNS lookup; the browser always freezes completely during DNS lookup. Make this affect only the document being loaded.
Obviously, this also means that the Firefox main UI should also be in a separate process, and you should use IPC and sharing of window-system resource IDs and handles to communicate between UI and document processes.
When the UI crashes, restarting the UI can sweep up documents that find themselves unattached and re-present them undisturbed.
Cross-site scripting and buffer overflow exploits have a much harder time hacking into information for other documents, because they are inaccessible in separate processes.

Actually, I think that firefox's reliance on extensions is rapidly becoming a problem. For so many features I'm told to "get a plugin", which often isn't being maintained to the same high standard as the rest of the browser.

I'm happy for many features to be in extensions and a lean, mean version to be provided for those who want it. I'd also like a "bloated" browser as well, full of plugins that are considered useful, carefully maintained, and also checked to make sure they all work well together.

By default, build in functionality to hunt down every little extension that covers all that extra functionality.

By default, include the functionality... as extensions. That way you can disable or uninstall a feature you don't want. Maybe the installer (in Custom mode) could even ask which of these features you want installed initially.

Make it fast, compliant and secure. Offer two versions for download:- Barebones, browser only, users must install their own extensions. Most geeks will want this one.- Some common and supported extensions preinstalled to support features included in competing browsers. Most people will want this one.

The solution seems simple to me. Move all the extra features to extensions, bundle those extensions with the browser, and turn them on in a "default" installation. Won't confuse your average user and would make the lean-and-meaners happy. Those of us with a bit more knowledge can disable the extensions we don't use, providing a benefit for people like me (and I suspect most others) who don't like to whine about Firefox bloat, but still think no more bloat than necessary is a good idea.

With extensions, Firefox does pretty much anything that anyone could want in a browser. I'd like only two things from Firefox 3:

1. More stability and less memory usage. On both Windows and OS X, Firefox can swallow all your system resources if you leave it running long enough and do enough browsing. On my machines, the program also crashes, infrequently but regularly, most often when a page it's loading is corrupted by a network error. Spend the effort on finding memory leaks and bugs instead of adding gewgaws.

2. Without changing the functionality of the interface or its basic elements, make it prettier. The buttons look big, garish, and way too colorful; look at Safari for one example of a better way. (I use a skin to make my Firefox installs look much like Safari, but I think a more professional/more beautiful interface could inspire more people to switch.)

3. Ability to save any browsing session. That is, save everything you are presently doing in Firefox to a big file. After that, Firefox can be closed, your computer can be shut off, etc, and later you can come back, open Firefox, and load your browsing session from the saved file.

Only works with 1.5+. And upgrading means hunting down and reinstalling ALL of your extentions. Have fun. This functionality was built into Opera over six years ago, with no extensions/upgrades necessary.

I still use the Qute theme which, ironically considering the Debian thing, they abandoned a long time ago since someone else held the copyright. They should get a decent default icon set, because I honestly think the one they use at the moment is abysmal.

After reading the current list on the Mozilla feature brainstorming page, if even a few of these features get built into Fx 3 is going to be too heavy to be practical. I am already concerned about Fx 2.0. Such things as built in spellchecker is fine in an extension, but I have no need of it (screw you grammar nazis, spelling isn't standardised between countries and hasn't been standardised at all for much more than a century). I have not yet upgraded to the RC, and not entirely sure

All I want is a simple option on the "Do you want to remember passwords for this site?" popups that says "no, and never ask EVER for ANY site". The only way to get rid of these worthless annoyances is some obscure setting buried in a menu. While it would be even better not to ever have been asked this in the first place, an option to get rid of all of these on the popup should not be too much to ask for. Other than that, no complaints. Nice clean UI, especially compared to IE7 !!!

I doubt they will do this though. The password popup window already contains too many buttons: [Yes], [No] and [Never for this site]. End-users are already instantly paralyzed when they see a window with three buttons, like a deer in the headlights of an onrushing car. Adding a fourth button will make their brains melt out of their ears.:)

You are right about having three buttons. I wish Firefox came instead configured by default "no popups at ALL". Worthless Firefox-generated popups like the password one are just as annoying as the X-10 camera ones. The way is is now, with an obscure setting buried in a menu, does not cut it.

Well, if you can think of a better way to present the info about password sharing to the user, please submit a bug! Remember that you can't rely on the user reading any documentation, and that the password storing feature must be enabled by default, or the user will assume that Firefox doesn't have the feature at all and will go back to IE.

"End-users are already instantly paralyzed when they see a window with three buttons, like a deer in the headlights of an onrushing car."

True, but most people that use Firefox aren't your typical "end-user" that automatically clicks "OK" on dialogue boxes. FF users are a tad brighter than that...usually. I only find the pop-up annoying when I'm logging into a site for the first time after a total browser re-install (or any other situation wherein my passwords are no longer saved) and can't remember wha

I use the "No" all the time, when I'm accessing a site where (a) I don't know if I will be using repeatedly or not, or (b) I don't know if the user name / password combo is correct. That is, I don't want *anything* about this site to be stored, whether "don't ask to save a password here" or "save the password for this site." I want a limited number of sites stored in my preferences, and don't want to have to go through and purge the list more often than I have to.

[ ] Yes, please have it visible for every sucker that can physically or remotely access this pc.[ ] Yes, but first let me make a masterpassword to secure it.[ ] No, maybe later.[ ] No, never for this site.[ ] No, and never bother me again.

All I want is a simple option on the "Do you want to remember passwords for this site?" popups that says "no, and never ask EVER for ANY site". The only way to get rid of these worthless annoyances is some obscure setting buried in a menu.

In Firefox's preferences dialog, go to "Privacy", "passwords" and uncheck the "remember passwords" checkbox. I fail to see if this is an obscure setting or if it is even even burried in a menu.Have you even bothered to look at Firefox's preferences?

Especially integration with things like GPG for automatically authenticating posts in web forms and web mail. Has anyone found an extension to do that? There's a encryption plugin for gmail I believe but no general extension for all web forms.

It could seriously kick off use of GPG amongst the non-geeks for authentication (mostly) and encryption (past a critical mass). I don't believe it would be that difficult to explain to normal IT literate (ie, already uses Firefox or Opera) the benefit of signatures in evading blame and establishing trust.

I'd like to be able to browse my history by when I closed, rather than opened, a page.

I can't count the number of times I've closed a tab and then wanted it back later in the day, but been unable to find the url because I've actually had it open on my desktop for several days (so it's not in yesterday's history.) Being able to sort history by "close time" as well as "open time" would be really useful.

Firefox 2 has added a "Recently Closed Tabs" list in the History menu. It might not work as well as a sorted view of the whole history panel, if you want to get back a tab that you closed hours ago and it's fallen off the bottom of the list; but it's good if you realise soon after you accidentally close it.

The problem is that basically the only real market share out there for grabs, is people who don't know anything more than "I click in the internet icon". If you give them the bare-bones, they'll go back to IE7.

The solution would seem to be to have official plugins shipped with the browser installer, which power users could deactivate (during installation) or replace.

Though personally I feel some things should just be built in (remembering tabs on restart for instance)

Why can't the extra featueres be first-party extensions that are installed by default, and the installer has a 'Custom' installation option that lets you uncheck all of them? Seems like that would be the best of both worlds.

-- better Gnome desktop integration (currently, Firefox feels like it is trying to force Windows conventions down Linux users' throats), including better support for cut-and-paste and drag-and-drop of HTML, images, and other content

-- figure out some way of supporting drag-and-drop file uploads better

-- better editors for textareas (maybe support Mozex officially and find some way of letting users embed their favorite editors right in the page)

-- integrate better with Thunderbird and other Mozilla applications

-- replace the cumbersome XPCOM programming model (IDL compiler and all that) with something that's more like the Objective C object model and runtime

Eugh. We don't need more GNOME hideosity. I'd much rather see packages customized for each desktop environment. KDE, GNOME, whatever.

But for the love of God, don't standardize on a user-coddler like GNOME. I used GNOME for three years, with ever-increasing annoyance and frustration, until finally I said to hell with it and tried KDE.

I believe Firefox should continue to enhance and add support for SVG, SMIL, CSS, HTML, Javascript, MNG, DOM, and other technologies. I have never quite understood why, as well, there is not some sort of portable font system that could be used in web pages, where if a font is unavialable locally, one can be including on the web site, downloaded, and temporalily used to display the web page. One such system is Open Type. As far as implementing new protocol features not yet standardised, I think the best thing

Interesting yes. I wondered about the issue of including a font to be used by the web brower to display text. However, the font would not be used in context of encouraging the user to download it and install it on their system to use for their projects, but with the intention of the web browser using it to display your web page and then discarding it.Obviously, you can get away with using fonts in your web graphics and images, everyone does it. One feature that I think would actually be nice, come to think

Preferrably with control on the main panel to disable those sites with annoying float over ads that obstruct the view of the article you are trying to read. This is important since the Shockwave Flash positions itself as a mechanism for advertizers to bypass browser controls. Shockwave needs to be seriously slapped down.

Provide a way to get a list of all the loaded extensions and plugins, and how much memory each is using. That will silence all the people who install memory-leaking extensions and complain that FF itself leaks memory, and also force the authors of those extensions to fix the leaks.

Provide a way to get a list of all the loaded extensions and plugins, and how much memory each is using. That will silence all the people who install memory-leaking extensions and complain that FF itself leaks memory, and also force the authors of those extensions to fix the leaks.

I've thought for a long time that there would be significant benefits in running the extensions in their own processes instead of part of the firefox process. It would isolate their memory (memory leaks are easier to see and they

Wait until the password has been accepted before offering to save it.
I agree with the need, but how can the browser tell if a website has accepted your password? Whether it's accepted or denied, a web page comes back. It's the content of the web page that tells you, the user, that it wasn't accepted.

Perhaps a box should stay on screen until you close it (with "keep" or "discard" password). Then you can try it, and verify, and then let Firefox know the results.

However, the shortcut is ctrl+k for search and ctrl+l for search - that is to say the exact opposite (at least on a danish keyboard) orientation of the addresse and search bar. Stupid and avoidable usability error which is impossible to fix now as everyone has grown used to it:(

What would be nice is to have those pesky dialogs part of the window they belong to, in their own little UI. So they don't block me from changing anything in the address bar, looking at other tabs etc.

What I had in mind was slightly different. When you first turned it on after a defined period it would open all the tabs you normally check. However you would still have only one homepage, and if you clicked on the home button you would only get that page, not the whole set. I don't think it already does that, does it?

I use my homepage as a navigator, so I don't want 10 pages opening every time I click on it.

When you first turned it on after a defined period it would open all the tabs you normally check. However you would still have only one homepage, and if you clicked on the home button you would only get that page, not the whole set. I don't think it already does that, does it?

A easy workaround is modifying the Firefox shortcuts on your desktop, and just add the parameters url1|url2|url3 etc. Granted it's not easy, but then again, I'm not sure redefining what a 'homepage' is, is good either.

However since there are many, many transparent GIFs out there its useful to try and improve the look of them. Particularly so since you already have the code for full alpha PNGs in there. Taking the existing jaggy transparent GIFs it is possible to recognise the edges of the 1 bit alpha mask and create smoother alpha values, extrapolating edge color values appropriately to arrive a smoother GIF image edges.

Yes its a hack, and I'll guess there are some smart algorithms out there to do it bett

Many web pages depend on GIF's all-or-nothing transparancy rendering. Fixing the pages that weren't designed with GIF's limitations in mind would break those that were.

It's the task of the web developer/designer to make the site pretty. The browser shouldn't try to second-guess them by modifying images to disobey what the image spec specifies. Not by default anyway. I have no beef with this feature being an extension.

Full SVG support, integrated and sorted (should have been done before)

"Full SVG" doesn't make it entirely clear what you want, given the different versions and profiles. Most web browser developers seem to dislike [dbaron.org] the recent SVG Tiny 1.2, because its design is unsuitable for the web. Mozilla already has bloat problems [mozillazine.org] with their SVG implementation (partly their fault, partly because the spec is large and complex), and some developers want a simpler SVG [vlad1.com] because most people don't actually need SVG - they jus

I've yet to find an extension for this, so if there is one, please let me know.

It's all too often when I middle-click a link to open in a new tab, only to get the tab being "Untitled" and the URL starts with "javascript:". Is it too much to ask that Firefox detect a javascript link and prevent it from opening in a new tab (or window, but usually I catch those), and merely run the javascript?

But how about 100% standards compliance on the CSS front? This goes for CSS1, CSS2, and the nearly complete CSS2.1. I'm quite sure with things going as they are, CSS3 ought to be available by the time Firefox 3.0 makes a debut.

The capacity to convert a tab (and any tabs opened from links on that tab) to a new browser window. Many times I've been, you know, skimming through Slashdot and I've come across something interesting, so I open it up in a new tab and finish skimming. Sometimes I'll open a few sub tabs. Anyways, I wind up with a "dozen" tabs open. It'd be nice to shunt the related tabs off to a new window.

While I know that you can right click to access a menu to add a pare as a bookmark, I really really hate the fact that in the bookmark menu the add bookmarks and manage bookmark controls scroll with the rest of the bookmarks. I can't tell how many times I've been at the end of a long list of bookmarks and had to scroll all the way back up to the top of the list to access the "bookmark this page!" In IE6 the manage and add "favorites" menu items stay put. That's teh ONLY thing that IE does better than Firefox!

Untill Firefox supports 'Active X' components it will never achive the market penetration that it requires to displace IE. Supporting 'Active X' components, a Microsoft web standard, will also make it more acceptable to corporate IT departments since lagacy web services will not have to be re-written in order to run in its non Microsoft standard environment resulting in a lower cost of conversion.

1.Improve the memory usage.2.Better ways to find extentions that are leaking resources.3.If a URL being displayed results in "host not found", "cant contact server" or an error such as 404, it should not be added to the history. Also, URLs should only be added to the history once they get past that step and actually recieve a "200 ok" reply from the server with a piece of data or something. (i.e. if I press escape to cancel loading before it actually loads, it shouldnt go in the history)4.Bring back MNG support.5.Better security features. I want to see a world where (once a small amount of initial setup is taken care of), encrypting and/or signing an email is as simple as clicking a button on the email compose form with the program doing the rest. (although this feature is probobly more a thunderbird feature than a firefox feature)

only from people who are willing to register and login at their wiki, not from 'the public'.

My two biggest requests would be

1. An option to enable an *ABSOLUTE* restriction on new content windows. Even with the 'pop up blocker' fully enabled some sites still manage to open new windows. I would like these FORCED into new tabs, always, NEVER permitting additional content windows to open (dialogs for FF itself, preferences, etc would still be acceptable)

2. An interative javascript debugger, that includes the ability to run scripts in a 'step mode', override/block the execution of specific js statements (or force conditional branches), and change the contents of variables.

3. An ability to prevent detection of the absence of specific plugins, enabling the user to take control back of media served by websites (eg, "Sorry, you dont have Microsoft DRM-enforcing plugin X, so we wont serve this media to you" - the ability to force the site to just give the URI to the browser, and let the *USER* decide how to retrieve it and what to do with it from there)

Firefox does not provide any reference to a dragdrop file from the users FileSystem.This is a HUGE issue as it prevents Drag and Drop file uploads for AJAX applications.Sure, there is a FF Extension to solve this, but requires the user to install for such a behavior to work.

This should be a native solution. Can Firefox please reconsider their stance on this issue?For years, drag and dropping of files into application windows has been EXPECTED behavior.Firefox should allow AJAX applications the same sort of functionality.As it stands, Firefox is the only browser I can not create a strictly script based solution for.

Below is an example. As we can see, the dragdrop event is useless except for preventing the dragdrop event from continuing propagation after we capture it.

Also, firefox (on Mac at least) does not properly recognize an onBlur when I click on a non-firefox application window.onBlur only happens when we click on a 2nd Firefox browser window - bad bad bad.This and the above dragdrop issue means that Firefox is not properly supporting OS integration.Addressing these issues would be huge in more robust user experience and application capabilities for AJAX developers.

It's absurd that I have to code up basically an extension to add a new search engine to the search box. Galeon [sourceforge.net] has had the ability to add a new "smart bookmark" by just copying and pasting the appropriate URL for years. AcidSearch [pozytron.com] for Safari, will automatically find and add the appropriate search URL for you if you want. Firefox on the other hand is makes it incredibly difficult, or causes you to resort to those ugly Rollyo pages.

Completely unacceptable, and worst of all, I don't even understand how they even thought that their approach was even remotely necessary.

With Eclipse, a Java IDE, you can position tabs in any logical assortment you see fit by just dragging the tab, e.g.:-----|1| ||-|2||3| |-----

is a perfectly valid tab configuration. Here, 1 & 3 take up the upper-left quarter and the lower-left quarter of the window respectively. 2 takes the entire right half. With larger monitors becomming the norm, this would be a great enhancement for those who would like to make better use of their horizontal space.

When I click on a link that opens a PDF or other document, by default that should open in a separate popup.

To solve this issue, remove the Adobe Reader plug-in from your Firefox plug-ins folder. This will cause Adobe Reader to launch in a separate process with its own window. Or just ditch Adobe Reader and install Foxit Reader, the PDF viewer with less bloat.